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This thesis analyses the commercial relations between Scotland and the geo-political area known as the Iberian world in the early modern period. Despite being geographically one of the largest areas of Europe, as well as arguably the politically most weighty, there has, until this thesis, been no scholarly research on Scottish trade relations with this area. Though the archives suggest regular and sustained contact, very little is known about Scottish-Iberian connections beyond the overtly political. When compared to northern Europe the region of Iberia and its dominions differed significantly, not only due to a different branch of Christianity being practised there but also due to the influence of the Habsburg empire and the power it was perceived to give the Spanish Habsburgs. Looking predominantly at Scottish commercial contacts with Spain, the Spanish Netherlands and Portugal, this project considers a number of angles such as England's impact on Scottish commercial relations with Iberia. For example, very little would be known about Scottish commercial relations with Iberia in the late-sixteenth century if it were not for the Anglo-Spanish war of that period. The central role of conflict in Scottish-Iberian relations continues into the seventeenth century, with the Cromwellian/Stuart struggles with the Dutch Republic and later disputes between the new state of Great Britain and Habsburg Spain all affecting trade. This thesis demonstrates the important role of triangular and entrepôt trade, which was popular with Scottish merchants who wished to obtain Iberian goods without the risks of sailing into North African corsair territory. Scots did not merely pick up Iberian goods from the entrepôt markets of London and the Dutch Republic they also organised trade to Iberia and its dominions via other Scots, providing evidence of a complex trade network. Further, this thesis has sought to ascertain that, despite the lack of a large Scottish community such as those seen in Poland-Lithuania and Scandinavia, Scottish commercial relations with Iberia were valuable both to the Scottish economy and its merchants. This thesis which continues the work of the Scotland and the Wider World Project, addresses a lack of scholarly work regarding Scottish commercial connections with this key geo-political area.

Cornelis Everaert (1480-1556) was a playwright in the tradition maintained by the Chambers of Rhetoric (rederijkerskamers) of the Low Countries. He also created the largest known body of work by a single author to come from this tradition (thirty-five plays across nearly thirty years), and the author of most of the surviving plays from this area and period that deal with economic themes. My original contribution to research on this body of work – as well as our knowledge of witness accounts of the early Renaissance economy in northern Europe – is a conception of Everaert’s eight "economic plays" as part of one complete narrative of the decline and fall of the economy in his hometown of Bruges, which sunk into a deep depression at the turn of the sixteenth century from which it did not recover for decades. The plays form an aborted redemptive arc in which the market of Bruges is corrupted and then continually blocked from recovery by the unvirtuous choices of its participants, played out in a drama of acting and reacting. They reflect a layman’s understanding of the economy and the forces that drove it, which instructs their author’s middle-class audience on how to use the market to pursue their own advantages while also fulfilling their obligations to the broader community. Outside of the analysis of these eight plays, I have also translated them into English in order to enable their broader study and potential performance; this will be the first readily available English translation of any group of Everaert’s plays.